“Just tonight,” I explained. “Basile sent me, but he’s instructed me to stay no more than one night in any place.”
“Is he safe? I’ve been so worried. I’m sure you’ve seen the posters.”
“Posters? No! I just arrived from Paris yesterday.”
“They are fixed to buildings…electricity posts…all over the place. You’ll see them sooner or later,” she muttered, scowling. “Basile is a wanted man—quite desperately wanted, I suspect. You must make sure he knows to be careful. They have drawn a likeness of him that is quite good, considering.”
It was just as we’d feared. I sent a quick prayer of gratitude that Colonel Maxwell had had the foresight to keep Basile out of the region.
“And Jérémie?” I asked her. “Do you know anything of his fate?”
“That boy was like a grandson to me,” she said heavily.
“Was?” I repeated, heart sinking.
“Well, he may well still be alive of course. They arrested him two months ago.”
“Then I’m guessing they also found his wireless set and crystals.” Jérémie’s wireless set was almost certainly camouflaged in a suitcase—most of the SOE sets were. The set required a crystal to be fitted in order to transmit, and it was our practice that these crystals should always be stored separately as an additional security measure.
“I’m sure you know the damned Germans have those vehicles now that detect the signals,” she said. The direction-finding vehicles had made w/t operators’ lives so much more difficult—they drove up and down the streets searching for a wireless signal and could narrow down the origin point to just a few dozen feet. “Jérémie had been moving all up and down the coast, signaling from fifty-odd locations sometimes dozens of miles away. I never knew when I’d see him, but if he was near Rouen, he usually came back here to rest or just to hide his set here. A few weeks went by and I hadn’t seen him, so I started to worry. To contact Basile, I would leave a message with the butcher below his apartment, but when I went to summon him, the butcher told me he was gone.”
“He was evacuated to London,” I told her.
“The following week, the Gestapo arrested me. God only knows how, but they knew Jérémie had stayed here.” The thought of this frail woman being interrogated left me feeling ill. Madame Laurent picked up her coffee cup and cradled it in her trembling hands. “I told them he knocked on my door looking for work. I said he reminded me of my late husband so when he told me he had nowhere to sleep, I did what I could to help him.” She grinned. “My Aloïs was short and stout, nothing at all like Jérémie, who is built like a beanpole. But the Gestapo assumed I was telling the truth just as I knew they would. As you’ve no doubt learned yourself, men are all too quick to believe a beautiful woman runs entirely on sentiment and knows nothing of substance or value.” She said this without a hint of irony or self-deprecation, just a calm reflection from a woman in her nineties who had understood herself to be beautiful her entire life. And in that moment, it struck me that she was beautiful—that the lines on her face were beautiful, that her silver hair was beautiful…her courage was beautiful. I was probably close to seven decades her junior, but I wanted so much to be like her one day. “And maybe because I am old, they didn’t beat me or torture me. I had a few rough nights on an uncomfortable mattress before they sent me home. I learned that Jérémie was also being held at the prison, and after my release, I went back and insisted they let me visit him. I saw him twice before he was moved. I took him food and some fresh clothes but…” She swallowed hard, and her gaze grew distant and her voice faded to a whisper as she said, “…what he really needed was a doctor.”
“He’d been beaten.”
“Beaten does not describe what that man had been through. He was missing half of his teeth, and that wasn’t the worst of it. He was so hysterical, I couldn’t get a word of good sense out of him. It almost killed me to see him like that.”
Most likely, the Gestapo had beaten and tortured Jérémie until he broke and told them everything—probably the location of his set and crystals, details of his security procedure and encryption key, his transmission windows. Like me, Jérémie was trained by the SOE in ways to withstand such torture, but we all understood that no training in the world could truly prepare a person to resist it for an extended period of time. Sometimes, an agent broke and secrets were betrayed.
The Germans had Jérémie’s wireless unit and everything they needed to impersonate him—everything they needed to do a better job of communicating with Baker Street than he’d ever managed himself.
“And Madame Laurent, you say the Germans have moved Jérémie?” I had to be sure. If there was any chance he was still being held locally, I would try to find local resistance operatives to help rescue him.
“Yes, on my next visit, I learned he was sent on a transport. The butcher told me that the Maquisards were starting to fall too and he was scared he would be next. I went back to see him last week, and his apprentice asked me to leave and not return—the Gestapo took the butcher in the night.” Madame Laurent’s voice had dropped to a whisper, but she raised her chin now as she told me, “My role in all of this has been small, but I’ve had a good life. If they come back for me—even if they kill me, I will go to my grave knowing I did my best to help liberate France and that is all I ever wanted. But you, my dear—you are young and you have so much to lose. Do you understand how much danger you are in, coming to the zone interdite and asking questions like this?”
“You don’t need to worry about me, Madame Laurent,” I assured her. “I know exactly what I’m doing.”
My life had meaning—real meaning, and I was absolutely determined to make it home to Hughie. But no SOE agent went into the field without an awareness that they might not return. We all understood the miserable reality that sometimes, an agent’s death could mean every bit as much as their life.
That would not be me. It didn’t matter what it took—I was going to make it home.
“I need one more favor from you,” I told her quietly.
“Anything,” she said.
“Tell me…where will I find this butcher’s shop?”
It was one thing to confirm that the circuit had been compromised. Now, I had to confirm exactly what remained intact.
C H A P T E R 8
CHARLOTTE
Liverpool
May, 1970
The garden is a chaotic explosion of color this year—sweet peas and roses and lilies and peonies just in this section alone. Closer to the house, masses of sunflowers are stretching higher as they prepare to bloom, and thatches of clematis and creeping thyme border the paved path. Dad planted extra flowers this year, maybe to make up for the ones Mum isn’t here to plant herself.
I’m sitting out in my bathing suit enjoying the sunshine. My book is open on my lap, but I’ve barely read a page all morning. Instead, I’ve been sipping my tea and watching the bumblebees and butterflies flit from blossom to blossom in Dad’s garden.